In the following excerpt, Stout examines the narrative technique that the author employs in Democracy. The critic contends that the narrator, named "Joan Didion," includes hesitations, blanks, gaps, and other "silences" in her narration as a means of both implying more than what is said and emphasizing the ways in which a male-dominated American society inhibits the expression of women.

[In] Democracy, Didion Writes in the terse, elliptical style [her] novels had taught us to expect of her, but With a somewhat different and more highly politicized import. As in A Book of Common Prayer, the narrative strategy involves a first person narrator only slightly distanced from the author herself. Indeed, the distance is even less here. The narrator of the earlier book is particularized with a name, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and a personal background clearly distinct from Didion's own. The narrator of Democracy is a thinly fictionalized...